I always believe it gets better
One difference between you and I
Your heart is inside your head
One word from me
A clear design on your liberty
Who could believe when love has gone
How we move on like everyone
If there's one thing that's a constant in life, it's change.
And for me, change came to WoW Classic the instant the 10 hour war ended and AQ opened up.
The Molten Core run that Cardwyn had been attending for 2+ months is being shut down in favor of two separate Blackwing Lair runs --one from each guild that hosted the MC run-- which leaves those without sufficient gear to attempt BWL in need of a new home.*
Like Cardwyn, who has about half T1 and half T0 gear.
I realize that for some it's a minor inconvenience, and they can just go find another pug to run MC with**, but it was nice to have a regular run that I could count on to be there and develop friendships with. And with me being a bit of a night owl when it comes to playing, there aren't that many Molten Core pugs around Midnight EDT on the server.
There's also one additional problem that has to be considered: everybody and their grandmother is running AQ20 or AQ40, and if you're running those you're not likely going to be in many other raids.
And if you're doing AQ20/AQ40, when you're not actually in the raids, you're farming the mats for the raids.
I've seen references in the Myzrael Discord channel and in other spots online to the sheer volume of flasks and whatnot that some of the more progression oriented raiders are utilizing in the AQ instances, and it ain't pretty. Unless you've got a huge amount of gold coming in you're going to have to spend a ton of time farming mats to make the pots to just raid AQ40 once a week. And that's not even counting all of the scrounging you'll need to do to find Nature Resist gear to use in AQ20/40, which if you want to be in AQ40 right now that means even more time spent doing things in support of the raid when you're not in the raid.
And here's Az and Card with only half of a T1 set***, watching all this and wondering when did WoW Classic turn into a second (or third) job.
***
Such is the WoW Classic life now: the people who I like to run with have all moved on and aren't really available to run the instances/raids I'm running, and with Shadowlands on the horizon and coming fast, I suspect that the WoW Classic environment will take a massive population hit for at least the six months after the October launch.
Sure, one obvious solution is to focus more on what I can control, which means running Battlegrounds and finding instance pugs where I can, or maybe even level an alt.
 |
| Like this young Paladin. I think Card knows her. |
And I have been receiving whispers from people I know who have guilds who are recruiting --not really poaching, as the guild I'm in is only a few people and of the group only 2 of us raid with any regularity-- but the requirements are to be either AQ ready as-is or at least be Blackwing Lair ready, neither of which I am at present.**** It's not like I don't know the guilds or the people, because I've run with plenty of their guildies over the past 6 months or more and I'm fine with them, but the reality is that they're going progression and their entire focus is the immediate needs for the progression raids.*****
And to be honest, if AQ is so demanding on a player's time, I'm not so sure I really want to raid there any time soon.
I talked with a guildie about it, and he's planning on going to AQ only when enough people get geared enough to make pugs more practical, probably when Naxxramas starts getting close to dropping.
Until then, I guess I'll muddle through.
*One of the BWL pugs is purely recreational, if you can call a BWL run that, and the other is oriented at people who want to move into progression raiding. The guild running the latter intends to use that run as --more or less-- a farm team for their main progression teams.
**Myzrael is a medium population server, so higher pop servers may not have this issue quite so much. And it should be mentioned that Zul'Gurub runs continue on a regular basis, because of the "+hit" gear you can get out of Z'G which are necessary for BWL and later raids.
***If I had a dollar every time someone asked me "if you've been running Molten Core for over 2 months, shouldn't you be fully T1 geared yet?" I'd be able to quit my real job. Most of the T1 gear that Cardwyn and Azshandra are wearing dropped in the first 3-4 Molten Core runs, and just about every run since then has seen either a) repeat drops, or b) no drops at all. But boy, if I were a Druid/Warlock/Pally, I'd have been living large.
****And with Fire being the current "spec du jour", Card being Frost (for MC and BGs) sticks out like a sore thumb.
*****The recruitment blurbs for the guilds in the Myzrael Discord have changed over the months from being a mix of progression, casual, and somewhere in between to weighing heavily in the direction of progression. And it's not just that the progression guilds are recruiting more, the guild advertisements for the same guild have tilted heavily in the direction of progression as the War Effort ended.
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